Humility?

Another word that gets misused in the religious dialogue of our day is "humility." It suffers the same fate as tolerance in many ways. I recently saw it used as a way of describing Christians willingness to accept that there may be other ways of salvation.

The humility of Jesus (God) is the greatest in the world. God becoming incarnate to His creation and suffering and dying, becoming sin for us, is the greatest act of humility imaginable. Why would He bother if there were other ways, most of them built on the foundation of self-righteousness and self-justification, just as good? When you go down that road, you have denied all of Christianity, beginning with the greatness of God, and begun to accept multiple gods which is actually the road to no god at all.

When Jesus talked about ways to reconciliation with the Father and eternal life, he spoke of one way and that it was the narrow way. It isn't just His statement of John 14.6 (I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father but by me.") that is at issue here though that is particularly clear. It is the entirety of His message that must be dealt with. It isn't humble to throw that out in favor of pluralism, in fact it is the opposite of humility, it is arrogance.

Making Himself Known

Why would the creator not want to make Himself known and known clearly? We aren't sure in our day if the creator is knowable. There is a good impulse regarding religious beliefs in America in the 21st century, and that is that we generally believe there is a God or gods and that this God is a big dude, probably too big to be described by one religious system or faith. Now that isn't a bad thing in and of itself, it is a bad thing when those who describe themselves as Christian have that belief.

There are some battles that have been lost in my lifetime, and one of those is over the world tolerant. I am not quite sure how tolerance has somehow become equated with skepticism about your own beliefs. Intolerant would be persecution of those who disagree, it would not be intolerant to believe they are wrong and attempt to persuade them of their error if we believe that error has a significant consequence. If my house were on fire and I said to the firefighters that what they believed to be fire was instead rain it would not be intolerant of them to insist on their interpretation of reality and do all they could to rescue me from death. It isn't an issue of tolerance at all yet when Christians insist on preaching the Gospel to those who are dying and who we believe are risking eternity, somehow that becomes an issue of tolerance.

We can do and say a great many things that are indeed intolerant but preaching the Gospel is not one of them. Jesus could be quite intolerant of theological error, just as His Father was intolerant of the same, His Name was at stake. We believe that the Creator has made Himself known decisively and that His desire is for us to live with Him through eternity, but on His terms. We can be loving and proclaim that as truth, in fact, proclamation of that truth should be an act of love.

The evolution of God?

What use is a God who changes and evolves? There are theologians in our day who see God as "in process," that He, like us, is coming to new understandings and changing according to those understandings. There are certainly great benefits to be had in such a god, not the least of which is our ability to invent a god completely to our own liking, to throw out the bits of Scripture that make us uncomfortable or would require us to change and simply declare that God is changing His attitude towards things as He grows in understanding to catch up with us. I can see how such a god could be attractive if I had decided that I wanted a god who thought much like I do on things.

The problem with an "in process" god is that we can't truly know or declare anything about that god at all, all our understandings would have to be contingencies, until the god itself comes to fuller understandings. We are left with a god who would constantly be saying little more than "Huh, I hadn't thought of that." Essentially a radical Darwinian world view has been imposed upon the deity, even God is subject to evolution or, at the least, surprised by it in His creation.

The immutability of God is important for us who choose to believe in and follow Him. On this doctrine rests many others, including the sovereignty and omnipotence of God and the authority of Jesus to speak on behalf of the Father. If God is changeable, the cross is not necessarily the final word on sin, and if God's attitudes towards sin are evolving, then righteousness also is ever changing and at some point has no meaning at all as tolerance becomes the only measure of righteousness yet that tolerance is itself intolerant of what it deems to be intolerance which was originally defined as righteousness. The image of a dog chasing its tail comes to mind. To be changed into the likeness of God in Jesus Christ means that we can orient by the fixed point of the unchangeable nature of God, not a moving target.

Navigation

Before we moved to Asheville to begin planting the church, I came up every other Wednesday and held services. One week as I was driving I got a phone call to tell me we were going to meet at an OB-Gyn office and that the local newspaper was sending a reporter and a photographer to the service. I couldn't have been less excited. What kind of nut jobs would we look like, a handful of people meeting in a doctor's office?

When I got here the reporter wanted to talk so we went into a hallway and talked for over an hour and when the article came out not a single word I spoke was used. That was better than I had hoped, but it showed me that I had confused her agenda. The words she wanted me to use were conservative and liberal and I had rejected her political vocabulary in favor of orthodox and traditional. She wanted to interpret traditional in light of her own experience, a denomination that didn't allow women any role and I asked that she look at a longer tradition and find many women, Terese of Lisieux, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, and on down to Mother Theresa who served the church and who were used by God and recognized by the church.

As I think about the state of the church today, I realize that political thinking has dramatically shaped the church over the last century. We have become so accustomed to thinking in terms of evolving and changing that we have forgotten that while the church and its structures may change, God doesn't. Sailors need a fixed point for navigation and so do we in our lives. How the church fulfills its mission can change but its mission does not.

The Importance of Presuppositions

It is important to say that my presupposition is that there is a God. Since it can't be proven by scientific method whether there is or isn't a God, it is a matter of faith to say that there is a God. Once that faith statement is made and truly accepted, the world becomes a true wonder of a testimony to His greatness.

The presumption that there is a God begins to get at the question of "Why?" that science can't truly answer. It can say that there is life but it can't quite say why there should be life and in particular why this kind of life or whether this is a transitional phase to some other sort of life that will be a higher form but bearing similarities to this one. If we presume there is no God then we are left to construct meaning on our own, either as a cooperative venture or a solitary one and there is little basis for preferring the cooperative to the solitary.

The presupposition that there is a God should immediately lead us first to the understanding that if He had something to do with bringing about the universe in general and our life in particular, that He is great in the sense of powerful and capable of incredible things. If we simply begin with that presupposition we can easily pray the first sentence of the little mealtime prayer, but that statement of faith opens up a world of possibilities that is more vast than the universe itself.

God is Great

It is far easier to always know God is great than God is good. Does anyone who is a theist doubt that God is great? If He created all that is, it seems that there couldn't even be argument on that issue. Even if you believe in God the watchmaker, He is big enough to have created and walked away. Now if your perspective is Kantian, He is now dead, then maybe we could argue but the only real argument then would be, could the creator qualify as God if He ceased to exist.

The statement God is great is an enormous statement of faith and a wonderful place to begin, so wonderful in fact that it could be the summary statement of Genesis 1, John 1, and Ephesians 1 just to get started. Beginning with God is a good place to begin a prayer, beginning with "God is" is better still. A declaration concerning the greatness of God should get our attention as to what kind of God we are praying to. The God that even Jonah proclaimed on board ship as "the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." (Jonah 1.9) Would it be worth praying to a lesser God if a great one was available?

I don't want to deal with "Mother Earth" if I can deal directly with the One who created the earth do I? It isn't surprising that we invent such "deities" concerning the earth, sun, moon, stars and heavens, they are, in themselves, wonderful. We cling tenaciously to this life, spend enormous resources not just to understand it but to prolong it because we can't imagine anything better or more real. We are fortunate that this life has been good to us and for us, but it should raise our sights above ourselves and beyond ourselves to that greater something out there.

Six Life-Changing Words

The pressure to be "good" is too much to bear sometimes. Paul says in Romans that he isn't able to do it, that the good he wants to do is the very thing he doesn't do and vice versa. Living by the Spirit 24/7 is the only possibility and I don't find myself doing that on a daily basis. What I find is that there is a lot of painful stuff in my heart and head that keeps me from being able to live that way and I need the confession of Morning Prayer to begin the day and the confession of Evening Prayer to end the day. I don't often pray those specific prayers but I need to confess my sins in bookending the day.

The bigger problem with being "good" is that I can rarely do that without pride. At some level I see it as having made a conscious decision to be good or do good and when I do I then take credit for the good I have done which makes it not good at all. Doing good or being good can't be the goal of life, being Christ-like is the goal, doing all things at the direction of and for the glory of God.

I memorized a prayer to say at meals when I was a kid that began "God is great, God is good." If I could live out of those six words every day my life might actually look different. We need to remind ourselves of those two great truths at least the three times a day that we eat meals. If we could work those deep into our hearts and heads it would change the way we think about everything else.

Goodness and simplicity

Why is it so hard for us to understand that we aren't "good enough?" How many sins did Adam and Eve commit when judgment and death became a reality? One is the answer to that question. How many sins did Moses commit that kept him out of the land? One is that answer to that question also. It isn't to say that they committed no other sins in their lives, but one was enough to DQ them from participation in the fullness of life.

When we ask people whether they will get in at the end, the answer most often given is that they think they have been good enough. They haven't, I haven't, no one has but Jesus. When the rich young ruler first begins talking to Jesus here is the conversation, "And a ruler asked him, 'Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' And Jesus said to him, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.'" (Luke 18.18-19) Any questions?

Nothing exists apart from God that can be truly considered good. None of us is good apart from God, no matter what we think or what the rest of the world thinks. The Articles of Religion (particularly 11 and 12), the basis of Anglican theology, speak clearly about our beliefs in goodness. The only One with real knowledge of Good and Evil is God, and Jesus (God incarnate) says that no one is good but God. The sooner we stop trying to make judgments on good and evil and accept that God alone is arbiter of such things, the sooner we can receive mercy and grace which are aspects or characteristics of God, and therefore, eo ipso, good. Simple stuff.

Perfect love

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.

In Genesis there was fear, judgment and punishment and they were cast out of the garden. John says all that is done away with in perfect love. That perfect love is manifest to us in Jesus and John says that love is perfected in us in order that we have confidence in the day of judgment. That is all wonderful stuff, we don't have to hide ourselves when He comes, but there is more to the Christian life, more than abiding in God's love than simply having confidence and John knew it and said it before he got to this bit.

John says also, "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us." That is the pretext for the confidence. He says if we don't have that love for one another then we don't have a right to the confidence of the love of God. Salvation has implications for the way we live towards others too, it isn't just our little gift we will unwrap in due time.

Relational intimacy - fear and judgment

Why is intimacy so frightening? Sin has everything to do with that question. If I don't have anything to hide, intimacy is natural and no big deal. If you knew who I really am, what I really think, you might reject me, so we hide and avoid real intimacy. We fear not only exposure but judgment of others even on those things we aren't ashamed of.

I have had some time in the past few days to observe people avoiding intimacy with one another because it is safer to put up the facade and refuse to go deeper in relationships. Superficiality wears me out quicker than almost anything in my life and yet I spend most of my time on that level. Is there any hope for more?

We were made for intimacy, and the One who knows us with greater intimacy than we can imagine loves us enough to die for us. If we can live from the level of the Spirit and love with God's love, our relationships can be richer and more fulfilling. Do we really want that kind of relationship, enough to set aside our fears and our judgments? We can marvel at and talk about the love of Jesus for prostitutes and tax collectors and other sinners, but do we live that same way? We need a revolution.

Liturgy and life

Liturgy is always an interesting thing when you do weddings and funerals and most of the people are unfamiliar with any liturgy at all in church. I feel a need to explain why we use it and the purpose it serves. It is the earliest form of worship and teaches the story of God through repetition and asks that participants take responsibility for telling the story themselves in the Creed and in other places by singing and speaking.

We who use the creeds regularly in worship should be the most comfortable evangelists. We should know the story better than anyone since we recite it each and every week, yet often the words never become real. We simply know the words without entering the story ourselves, the truth is external to us and we can own the criticism that it is no more than rote memorization. The problem on the other side of the issue is that personal experience is disconnected from theological truths which in fact matter. The only story we have to tell is our personal story and yet there is a grander story than our personal salvation, there is the story of the Triune God that begins "I believe in God the Father Almighty creator of heaven and earth," takes in the life and death of Jesus for us, the Spirit given to us and concludes with life everlasting.

Liturgical worship draws us into common worship, we have sinned, we have been redeemed, we believe what the church has always believed, and in that we are drawn out of our private story and into the great story of the sweep of history that will continue into the age to come. Christ would have died for me if I were the only one who needed it, but He didn't, His work was bigger and greater and in accepting that I lose my sense of isolation and become part of the communion of saints. I need to celebrate that reality.

Marriage and the African Queen

As I prepare for a wedding this weekend, I recall my own feelings of both excitement and fear when I was preparing to get married 24 years ago. I am glad that we didn't live together first and then formalize the relationship, that I was forced to confront what was and should be a life-changing decision and the break that it represents with a former way of life. I am glad this couple is making even better decisions than we made and are anxious to talk about their future together because they want all the wisdom they can get as they enter this new life.

I recall the sense I had of being completely unprepared for what I was about to do. A few days before the wedding I had a "morose" evening when I realized that I was moving into new territory and my childhood was giving way to real adulthood. I had graduated from college and gotten a job and an apartment yet this step was bigger than any of those things and I suddenly knew it in a way that shook my core. I never thought about calling Suzanne and bailing out of the wedding but I felt like I was in free fall.

If I had any sense of what lay in store I probably wouldn't have done it based on the knowledge I had at the time. I wouldn't willingly have put her through the twists and turns, heartache and difficulty that was ahead if I had known it. As I look back though, I realize I couldn't have made it without her and all those difficulties have shaped and molded us in ways that made us one flesh, just as God intended. Maybe that whole running the rough river thing in the movie The African Queen that brings Bogie and Hepburn's characters together isn't so contrived after all.

Distinction with a difference

There is sadness in the declaration of Genesis 9, "The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea." That represents change in those relationships or it wouldn't be there in this way. The animals are given as food shortly after the declaration of Genesis 8 that "the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth." This is a permanent state of affairs, the fallen nature of creation is now accepted as a given.

There is a distinction in the Bible between humans and animals. From the start, man had naming rights over the animals and was given dominion over the animal kingdom. It established a pecking order in creation. Now that distinction is more sharply drawn after the flood. A reckoning for shedding the blood of man is required for humans and animals because mankind bears the image of God, at some level it is an attack on Him. How horrible then that God Himself is killed my man on the cross at Golgotha.

If murder of man who bears God's image but whose intentions are evil requires reckoning, what must be required for the murder of God's Son whose intentions were not evil? "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." As the future of creation depended on the faithfulness of Noah, so did the hope of eternity depend on the faithfulness of Jesus who is more than an image bearer. The writer of Hebrews says He is "He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature..." Now about those intentions of the heart, can He do anything about that?

Timing is everything

For nearly a year Noah is in the ark with his family and the animals, what was he thinking? Surely in some of that time he wondered if the waters would ever roll back, wondered if there would be enough food, wondered if God had forgotten him. Did he know the story of creation? If he did, he must surely have wondered why when it took the Lord only a day to separate the waters from the waters (Gen 1.6-8) and then another day to gather the waters so that the dry land could appear (Gen 1.9-10), did it take 40 days of rain to complete his judgment and then almost another 300 days to re-create the world from the chaos of the flood.

Where in the beginning the spirit of God hovered over the waters, now we have what must have seemed like an enormous ship when he was building it but what must have felt completely inconsequential during the flood, floating on the waters. The original creation was preserved in this one vessel through the righteousness of Noah.

What joy he must have taken in seeing the tops of the mountains again yet the time was not yet to come out of the ark. The sign that it was time to once again resume life was the return of the dove with an olive branch, things were growing again! Noah looked and saw the ground was dry, but after that it was nearly another two months before Noah left the ark. Why? Because he waited until God told him to leave the ark. In all things he waited on the Lord.

Saying Yes to God

At my grandmother's funeral yesterday someone said to me, "Oh yes you were one of those who were called to ministry later in life." My answer is that no, I was called early in life but I only answered "Yes" nearly 20 years later. In thinking through that as I drove home it made me appreciate both the Lord and those who did what Abraham did in saying yes at the start.

It is amazing to me that He waited on me for so long. It tells me something about the God I serve that in all the stuff I got myself into in those intervening years that He never gave up on me. For most of that time there was no reason to believe that my life would ever be as it is today. I realize that for most of that time I wasn't chasing anything in particular, mostly I was being chased and running as fast as I could and doing everything to avoid hearing His voice. Since I can't change the past I don't live with regret, but as I look at my life today and the things I have done and the people I have met, I look back wistfully on what might have been.

Men like Noah and Abraham amaze me. They just heard and did. In both cases though there were fatal flaws that in the end kept them from fully experiencing God's blessing. Noah got drunk and it ruined family relationships and Abraham took matters into his own hand to complete what God seemingly wasn't going to do Himself and even today we are paying the price. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. In spite of their sins, these men stand out from the rest to me yet I realize that I can't measure what might have been by projecting backwards, these men's lives tell me that.